He started laying the chicken out on the pan.
“Ethan was driving. I had the passenger seat. Two guys in the back—Kowalski, and a kid named Pruitt who’d been in country about three weeks. Device was packed into a culvert about ten feet off the road, and it went off under the driver’s side.”
He stopped for a second.
“I uh…I woke up around forty feet from the vehicle? I was the medic, but my leg was too fucked up to move. And besides—two of them were already dead. Ethan wasn’t…well, nothing was salvageable. Kowalski took a piece of shrapnel straight to the brain. Pruitt got hit in the stomach. You don’t come back from shit like that.”
He swallowed hard. I did too.
“Shrapnel caught me across the back and shoulder. Cracked two ribs. Busted my knee, and it still gives me trouble when it’s cold.” He slid the pan into the oven and finally looked back at me. “I went to boot camp with Ethan. He always told me to have a cigarette and a glass of whiskey for him if we lost him. So uh…that’s what I do every year on the anniversary.”
My eyes widened as I looked at him, my breath catching in my throat. “My birthday,” I whispered.
Wyatt let out a harsh laugh. None of this was funny. “Not quite. Two days after, but…usually take the weekend for it so it doesn’t interfere with work.”
I looked at him. "That's why you were at the Spur."
"Yeah."
"Alone."
"Yeah."
He turned back to the counter and started cleaning up—rinsing the bowl, wiping down the cutting board. I sat there and thought about that night. Wyatt leaning against the outside wall with a cigarette, looking out at nothing. The way his face had been doing something I didn't recognize.
I realized it now.
He'd been keeping an appointment.
And I'd walked around that corner in my tight jeans and cherry red cowboy boots and asked him to kiss me.
"Wyatt," I said. "I'm sorry. If I interrupted?—"
"You didn't." He said it fast. Flat. Then softer: "You didn't, Haven."
"I basically ambushed you on the worst night of your year."
He hung the dish towel back on the oven handle and turned around. Leaned against the counter and looked at me.
"I'd had the whiskey and the cigarette already," he said. "I was just...sitting in it. The way I do." A pause. "And then you came around that corner."
I waited.
"You were good for me that night," he said. "I don't know how else to say it."
My heart leapt. "Even though I kissed you on your dead best friend's anniversary weekend."
Something moved across his face. Not quite a smile. "He would've thought that was funny."
"Yeah?"
"Ethan thought everything was funny." He crossed his arms. "He also would've had a lot of opinions about you."
“Good opinions?”
Wyatt did smile now, shaking his head. “Let’s see…he would’ve thought I was too old for you. Too cranky. Woulddefinitelycall me out for the fact that I was getting blown up in Iraq while you were—what, five years old?”
I grimaced. “Three.”
